San Francisco Poem
Gene Fowler

only city i know
where you walk over a mountain
      on sidewalks, past bars
with beer smell and men laughing
                        not a sign of the top
just night and fog

smell of wet wool as overcoats go by
                        walk up til thighs
are bunched tight, walk down
til knees wobble, or
just lie down and roll to Market

belly dancing fog
      builds and hides half-seen women
to feed the thirst
coiled and rattling in my dream
dark spies to skulk and fear at edges
      of my shooting range
while i swell into a blazing sun of dream

                        night fog gliding inland
on naked, sexy feet
here's the city you'd love to bed

every poet i know
has a poem, somewhere, shivered out
      of rain-marshed parks and cobblestones
and brick water tanks against the next
      holocaust
about the Siren who hoots thru raucous horns
      at night from far away in the night
the ghost woman
whose orgasm rattle sounds like cable cars
                        flower vendors and tongues
from all the continents

i keep feeling her finger tips
ice wet with night fog and hunger for her
working down thru my legs, dancing
my feet
in some comic jig
beads of mist
cosmic rosaries, sequences mazed over
forgotten sand dunes
                              old Italians liking
the sound
of their dialect, even late at night, the smell
      of red wine and pasta and sweaty work clothes
home ainta dead
if youra still eata it
and i knew a North Beach painter put Naples Yellow
on his tongue

to see, Jesus--it tastes like paint

ten years ago
sitting late in a coffee house
writing poems in long shadows and flickered yellow
      from a hoarded candle
was the short way home, the mystic streetcar
and the poets were heroes in Holy Book novels, now
it's all dead

                        walking out late at night
kicking bits of newspaper
walking past silent Negroes on doorstoops, who look
out of dark eyes
where the wind stops
the new poem, coffee smeared, in my field jacket pocket

i wonder how to tell the keepers
of fashion
the value
of a table whose evening rent is one cup of coffee
and my friends are always
moving

Chinatown garbage
lining the sidewalks, in tins and crates mysteriously
marked out from our East, off, somewhere, to the west
      sharp fish and seaweed and poultry smells
the sea
drug up on land by strong backs
and knowing bellies, under the eyes
of uncountable years

my city taking on an ivory tint, her eyes
going soft
as aged silt in the paddies where food grows

                              i squat down and rock
between my feet
until the strain in my back is a long history
run my fingers over the rough
                                          grey grain
poke at a rubbery bit of food
i don't need
                  and the dawn comes

                              the topless pens
are being cleaned out
under the cool midmorning sun
                              somewhere the girls
sleep, breasts wrapped in blankets
moist thighs tucked up under that dim
odor of the sea

she's cool in her morning frock, but i've known
      her on hot, rumpled mornings, after the bad
nights

up over hills, around the corners of buildings
      across the brick water storage tanks
past iron gated stores
National Guardsmen spent a night sitting
or walking
reminding dark and frightened men and women
      this town is someone else's whore

                                          wonder who gets her
been all over her
like a kid petting, never getting
                                                IN

but she's too mellow
for a virgin

ocean rolling in
big cement wall scraping my ass thru my pants
sky a pale blue cavern
                                distant

as an alien cathedral

once a guy told me go to church to meet girls

wonder
will i maybe meet San Francisco
here


Gene Fowler
acorioso@earthlink.net